I'm curious about how everybody 'sees' Puppy, and have been fooling around with a few logo designs in GIMP.
In logos, a font style says a lot about the feel of something; so a quick way to start on a custom design is to review existing fonts, seeing how the specific letters form up and express 'the essence'.

Below are a few font styles from GIMP, which of them appeals to YOU the most? Why?

My immediate goal is to get a better icon together for places like Distrowatch; this is totally unofficial, but my hope is that we could have a contest sometime for a coordinating logo (and of course build a relational feel for the companion kennels). Hopefully this will tell us all something about Puppy's overall image. Anything I do is totally open source- feel free to use it as you see fit. Hope this is OK with everybody.

I'm absolutely horrible at deciding what I like more, so I rarely have a single favorite anything. So I wind up having to choose several favorites. For these, my favorites are:
Bremen
Forte
Maiandra
Simpson
Gaze

One thing I can choose a favorite for is my operating system. Puppy wins hands down._________________Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. --Muad'Dib

You're right; in the Distrowatch lineup, the distro icons are 80x80 pixels, just like the avatars here. People here seem to like the more cursive, informal fonts for Puppy.

There are a jillion subtle considerations in making a logo. One is that it should look good in tiny black&white only, so that's a good place to start.

Using an advanced graphics program like GIMP, with its vector paths, fonts can be stretched, perspectivized, texturized, even animated. This is just a starting point, but if the customized logo is related to font family, then it makes for nice associated headers & titles using 'stock' alphanumerics.